Vigilante Justice on the Electronic Frontier

Earlier this year, an Internet security firm, HBGary Federal, who did top secret work for the U.S. government, decided to start investigating a loose community of hackers who call themselves Anonymous. It is now clear, if it wasn’t before, that Anonymous does not like being investigated. E-mails were hacked, embarrassing episodes were exposed, and the CEO of HBGary Federal eventually resigned in disgrace.

PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and Amazon have all recently felt the sting of Anonymous, who temporarily shut down their online operations when these companies stopped processing donations and hosting content for Wikileaks last year.

I’ve even had a personal run-in with Anonymous. I was helping a nonprofit that educates teens on pornography addiction set up a new website two years ago. Anonymous, however, is a big fan of porn. So they launched a denial-of-service attack that shut down the site for a while. Once we got the site back online, the director of the nonprofit asked the lead programmer and me if he should send out a press release about the attack. We both emphatically said no. If you’re nice, we reasoned, maybe Anonymous will leave you alone. If you get them mad, we have no way to stop them.

Despite that incident, I generally like what Anonymous does, including the recently leaked e-mails from Bank of America.  However, it is vigilante justice.

So how do you stop online vigilante justice in the electronic age? From the enforcement end, I think it might be impossible.  Several members of Anonymous have been arrested for the most recent attacks. Still, Anonymous remains strong, especially in light of what happened to HBGary Federal.

It seems to me that Anonymous is a natural reaction to a host of modern fears: corporate secrecy, government secrecy, loss of access to a once open Internet, etc. The best way to stop vigilante justice would be to make sure justice is applied more consistently in general. If, for instance, Bank of America was already being rigorously investigated, then Anonymous would be much less motivated to expose their potentially incriminating e-mails. If PayPal, Visa and Mastercard had not been allowed to freeze funds intended for Wikileaks and not return the money to the original donors, then perhaps Anonymous would not have felt the need to intervene.

In the end, a crackdown on individual hackers will never stop vigilante justice on the Internet. The only way to stop it is to remove the need for it.